Quantified Self – Meetup: Tuesday, January 27th, UC Berkeley School of Information

The next meeting of the “Quantified Self” group will be held on January 27th, 2009 at the University of California, Berkeley School of Information.

The group focuses on the emerging practice of recording lots of data about your physical state and activity.  Its where life logging meets populations of people grappling with illness or seeking optimal health.  The idea is that close records of our health will reveal connections between behaviors and outcomes, letting us change our behavior or at least detect early when things go wrong.  Others are just interested in detailed record keeping, an extension of detailed blogging or life streaming.  In many cases people are sharing these records with others, sometimes to get social support to meet a goal like running more miles or loosing more pounds.

I find the topic interesting for all these reasons and because the technologies for the “Quantified Self” are also going to be applied to the “Quantified Other” – sensors that record data about your body may ultimately notice that you are near other people.  It is when machines automatically notice when people are near people that I think the “QS” effort will have greatest impact.

Kevin Kelly has been blogging about “QS” on a blog of the same name. This will be the 3rd meeting of Quantified Self people.  I was able to attend the second meeting at the IDEO offices in San Francisco which had a great turn out of people and presentations of projects for assembling personal biographies and recording fleeting thoughts.  Hope to see you at the next meeting!